(March 20, 2011 at 11:56 am)reverendjeremiah Wrote: WRONG! It is blatantly about physical creation. It SPECIFICALLY speaks of "day and night" when it means that the world was created in 6 days. It has man being created from DIRT. Now was that "spiritual" dirt, or material dirt? What is the "spiritual" implications of a woman being created from a mans rib?Whilst I believe material creation to have been caused by God, Genesis never addresses it.
Creation, as translated accurately from the biblical word 'bara', means to 'bring into order', and never to 'bring into existence from nothing' which is the assumed meaning from people trying to shoe horn a modern materialist view onto it.
Now 'creating' day and night seems illogical if you consider God had already created light... but the actual meaning is that God setup time.
This is all in line with ancient thinking we have record of... that the ontology was functional rather than material in nature.
God didn't produce man out of dirt... he formed him from the dirt. He formed Eve from a rib ...this isn't meant to be literal.. it's showing God ordering everything. Separating and making sense out of chaos.
Read Genesis like that and it makes perfect sense. Read it like it's supposed to explain making something from nothing and it makes no sense, because that is never what is being said.
